The AIDS Pandemic: Complacency, Injustice, and Unfulfilled Expectations (Studies in Social Medicine)

In this collection of essays, Lawrence O. Gostin, an internationally recognized scholar of AIDS law and policy, confronts the most pressing and controversial issues surrounding AIDS in America and around the world. He shows how HIV/AIDS affects the entire population — infected and uninfected — by influencing our social norms, our economy, and our country’s role as a world leader.

Now in the third decade of this pandemic, the nation and the world still fail to respond to the needs of persons living with HIV/AIDS and continue to tolerate injustice in their treatment, Gostin argues. AIDS, both in the United States and globally, deeply affects poor and marginalized populations, and many U.S. policies are based on conservative moral values rather than public health and social justice concerns.

Gostin tackles the hard social, legal, political, and ethical issues of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: privacy and discrimination, travel and immigration, clinical trials and drug pricing, exclusion of HIV-infected health care workers, testing and treatment of pregnant women and infants, and needle-exchange programs. This book provides an inside account of AIDS policy debates together with incisive commentary. It is indispensable reading for advocates, scholars, health professionals, lawyers, and the concerned public.

Lawrence O. Gostin, professor and director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities, has participated in many AIDS policymaking decisions since the beginning of the pandemic. Gostin has devoted a career to AIDS policy and law, serving national agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Institute of Medicine, as well as international bodies such as the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS. Gostin is one of the early pioneers in the movement to ensure basic human rights for those living with HIV/AIDS.